


Stray Dogs Barking At The Moon. The story of Yamazaki Sousuke

by subtlyfailing



Series: For those whose stories were not told. [3]
Category: Free!
Genre: Chronic Pain, Coping, Future Fic, Gen, Serious Injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-26
Updated: 2014-10-26
Packaged: 2018-02-22 18:13:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,276
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2517128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/subtlyfailing/pseuds/subtlyfailing
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There were times when he would forget, laying, staring into the night’s darkness, mind lingering somewhere in the realm between wakefulness and sleep. There were nights when his body was free of pain, when his heart was free of turmoil. At these times, he could almost allow himself to forget his tragedies.</p><p>Then he would move, and his shoulder would ache, and his world would crumble in on itself, again and again. </p><p>He had lived to swim once.</p><p> </p><p>They showed us his tragedy and called it a happy ending. It was not an end at all.</p><p>Let’s retell the story of Sousuke Yamazaki.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stray Dogs Barking At The Moon. The story of Yamazaki Sousuke

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [对着星星吠叫的野狗——山崎宗介的故事](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7195892) by [our_flame_never_goes_out](https://archiveofourown.org/users/our_flame_never_goes_out/pseuds/our_flame_never_goes_out)



There were times when he would forget, laying, staring into the night’s darkness, mind lingering somewhere in the realm between wakefulness and sleep. There were nights when his body was free of pain, when his heart was free of turmoil. At these times, he could almost allow himself to forget his tragedies.

Then he would move, and his shoulder would ache, and his world would crumble in on itself, again and again.

He had lived to swim once.

 

They showed us his tragedy and called it a happy ending. It was not an end at all.

Let’s retell the story of Sosuske Yamazaki.

  

Let’s talk about how Sousuke Yamazaki knew Rin Matsuoka his entire life. How they grew up and grew together, intertwined, rivalry and friendship like a double edged blade they danced on. They could fall to either side at any time.

Rin was the one with the scars. He had grown up on sorrow, loss curling beneath his skin. He grew up with ghosts just beyond his reach, on his heels, in the footsteps he so wanted to fill, and it made him driven.

Sousuke’s drive was himself. He looked at Rin’s dreams of relays and teams and called them useless. Rin had grabbed the goggles around his neck and yelled that nobody insulted his father. They were both sent home with notes for their parents. Sousuke made the decision to stop swimming with Rin the same night.

 

Let’s talk about how he named that his greatest regret. Not the overtraining, or the lying, or the way he had grown up cold and alone. Sousuke named his greatest regret the hasty decision of an angry child. He had grown up dreaming of ghosts, just like Rin. Ghosts with red eyes and red hair. Ghosts who looked to the future, but lived in the past. Sousuke’s ghost was a bold boy who dreamt just as big as he did.

He wanted so badly to stand beside him.

 

 No one would question the love he held for Rin Matsuoka. Yet, as time passed, they grew up. They grew apart. They said goodbye on a bus station on a cold winter morning, and everything changed.

  

Imaginary swordfights with broomsticks in school hallways became letters across continents. Impulsive races to school or roshambo-matches over the last can of soda became hastily jutted down lap-times.

Childish competition is harder when you’re a continent apart.

Sousuke wrote letters after supper, and posted them in the morning before going to school alone. He wrote about cherry blossoms, about swimming, he wrote about school and about how Gou kissed boys under mistletoes (that last one earned him an earful from the little firecracker herself). As a post script, he wrote _I miss you_ with shaking fingers and changed it to _I miss swimming with you_ before posting.

Rin wrote about the ocean and his host parents and how hard it was to learn English. He always added a post script of _I miss the cherry blossoms_ , and never mentioned his friends in Australia.

Spring turned to summer and then to autumn and then to winter, and Rin’s letters stopped coming. Sousuke stopped writing.

He kept swimming.

  

Let’s talk about how he swam.

How he kept swimming until no one could beat him. He kept swimming and grew stronger and faster and more skilled. Until medals and prizes decorated his bedroom, until letters from schools arrived in the mail, until he reached the very top.

Let’s talk about how he kept swimming until he couldn’t, any more.

Maybe he will never be able to again.

  

No one questioned the love he held for Rin Matsuoka.

Sousuke stumbled into the shower in the locker rooms and collapsed, the agony from his broken shoulder travelling like jolts of electricity throughout his body. The water turned scalding, turned lukewarm turned cold; he knew nothing but the pain.

Let’s talk about how nobody noticed.

 

Rin didn’t, his own demons took up too much space for that. His own demons, and Haruka’s. Rin watched Haru choke and stumble, not understanding why. He pushed until Haru pushed back, because he didn’t understand the struggles he faced. He was always too blinded by his own dreams to see the things right in front of him.

Sousuke cried like cracked glass, and there were no one around to hear him.

No one questioned the love he held for Rin Matsuoka. But had he no love for himself?

  

_“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”_

_“Because I knew you would cry”_

 

 Maybe he eventually gets used to the pain, learns to live with it to the point where he just doesn’t really think about it. Sometimes it hurts a lot and he falls into uselessness and hatred for his own bodily weaknesses. But usually it just hurts a little and he thinks that he can live with this.

He has no choice, after all.

He can never quite forget about the swimming, though. The smell of chlorine, the feeling of your muscles straining against water, of leaving your opponents behind, of being truly good at something. Swimming was him, and he can never truly leave it behind, no matter how hard he tries.

Maybe he gets recognized from wizened old newspaper clippings by people on the street, or maybe old classmates of him call him after years to catch up. It’s always the same. _Did you really quit swimming? You were the best of us, I thought for sure you would make it big._ Or maybe sometimes, he just passes the ocean and remembers how he could have crossed it, once.

Maybe he grows up bitter like black coffee. Maybe he just thinks how he could have been so much more.

He could have had so much more.

  

Gou visits him after regionals, knuckles ghosting the doorframe of his and Rin’s shared room before she enters. For once, she’s not looking for her brother. Her eyes are fixed on the brace on his shoulder, and he knows at once why she is there.

“You lied,” she says.

“Yeah, sorry about that,” he says back.

He smiles, but she doesn’t meet his eyes. She is sad for him, he knows. Gou always lived much more for others than she did for herself. She has grown up a lot, he thinks, like he always does when she’s near. She is no longer a wispy little thing that follows her brother around wherever he goes, or convinces Sousuke to play cards with her on cold Christmas mornings, bright eyes shining and impossible to reject. She doesn’t wear her emotions on her sleeve like Rin does, yet her eyes are misty at the edges as she lifts a hand to let her fingers trace the edges of the bandage.

Maybe he looks at this fragile and alien thing and wants to protect her.

“Hey, Gou,” he says with a smile. “How would you like to learn how to swim?”

  

Rin believed in mending broken things. Yet, for nineteen years, he himself was the broken one. In the end, Sousuke wasn’t the one who fixed him.

Maybe he really hates Haruka for it, for being the one to reach Rin when Sousuke never could. Sousuke could do nothing but reread old yellowed letters, and wonder what emotions really lay behind them, and Haru had looked into Rin’s eyes and saved him. Maybe he actually hates himself the most, for failing to do anything but watch from the side-lines. Maybe he hates himself for being fragile and broken, not being able to stay by Rin’s side.

  

Maybe in the end, Sousuke believed in mending broken things as well? He looks at Nitori and his brazen determination with which he swims, and decides to save him before he breaks himself for good. Like Sousuke had done. He recognizes something in the smaller swimmer, how he loves another person so dearly, he destroys himself to be by their side.

Rin dreamt big, and his dreams led him far – far and out of his reach. Sousuke dreamt big as well, and his dreams led him to pain. Pain and loneliness.

He knew how people looked at him, this cold giant with a lonely past. But could you really blame him? Sousuke knew cold. He knew it well.

He knew the cold of competition, and journalists with cameras and stories that painted him a prodigy, and then a tragedy when that time came.

 

_"Could we have an interview?"_

_"Go to hell."_

 

Somewhere in all his swimming he had become concrete, cold, grey. Haru tensed like wild prey when he approached. Nitori jittered like a rabbit. But Gou called his name with like starlight (she saw him and not his swimming, he would be forever thankful for that). Then Rin looked at him, and suddenly they were twelve again, unbroken, uncomplicated.

  

But so much could change in 6 years. Sousuke was fire and iron. Hard work and drive. He chose to distance himself, and grew up tasting regret.

So he goes to see him. He goes and he sees and he knows he is no longer the one to stand by his side. Maybe when he meets Rin again, he wants to make him choose. But he doesn’t. Maybe he knows he would not be the one chosen?

He looks at the way these boys swim and feels weak. He feels jealous. And he hates this body of his. This broken body. He was better than all of them once. Now, he can run 10 miles each day, but he crumbles to the floor in pain when reaching into the cupboard with the wrong arm.

It’s not that he doesn’t learn to live with it, he does. But he cannot forget. It won’t allow him to forget. Every single day, what he could have done and been.

 

It takes some time, but Gou is eventually able to take a few shaky strokes across the pool. She buys coffee at the corner café as thanks. Gou smiles like sunshine, and Sousuke feels a bit better, even as his shoulder gives off that constant ache.

Maybe he is broken beyond repair, but that doesn’t mean he cannot save others.

 

  _“I’ll be waiting for you”_

_“I’ll give I some thought”_

 

Rin had heart. He had hope. He had determination. But even that cannot put a broken thing back together again perfectly. There will always be lines visible, crevasses in the glass where it shattered.

Rin never was good at letting things go. Sousuke had years of practice doing exactly that. Is he not the one who knows better than anybody that some things cannot be mended, once they lay shattered on the floor?

 

Sousuke knows what it is to watch your dreams slip between your fingers like sand in an hourglass as time moves by far too quickly. 

 

Time moves too quickly and he just stands still.

 

Gou brings him onigiri for lunch some days when he works the shop alone (and his father isn’t there to scold him for slacking off). They talk about school, and about her club and sometimes, about Rin(he keeps forgetting to call, she says, it’s lonely. Sousuke nods and can relate).

Sometimes she brings her friends along. A sweet but shy girl with mousy brown hair who blushes every time she catches his gaze. She’s got a crush on you, Gou whispers when he throws her a questioning glance the third time it happens, and Sousuke doesn’t know how to reply to that, so he doesn’t. Rin was always better with emotions, and girls.

 

The blond kid, Nagisa, keeps insisting on calling him Sou-chan, which is absolutely ridiculous, but he hands him a chocolate bar and he shuts up easily enough. It’s worth Gou scolding him for messing up their carefully planned nutritional regime.

He had been seventeen when his dreams died.

 

Suddenly he is nineteen and has resigned himself to working in his father’s shop. He stacks boxes and watches the sunset over the ocean and wonders; will he ever be truly happy?

It’s not fair at all, is it? After all, what heinous crime did he commit to be deserving of such faith? He who carved his own path in life, with blood and sweat and burning muscles? He who dreamt so big and who came so close to achieving those dreams?

Faith favours the fearless, they say. Those who go out and work for what they want, no hesitation in their stride.

I think, if Sousuke could hear you say that, he would laugh in your face, hard.

Faith, he’d say, favours the fortunate.

 

Halfway through her slice of cheesecake, Gou looks up at him with bright, earnest eyes that are so much like Rins, but that doesn’t make him crumble in quite the same way, from the inside and out. Their expression much differs from Rin’s as well, Gou doesn’t look at him in pity, or denial, or desperation – there are no tears staining her cheeks – but she is curiosity and concern and adoration, just like when they were children.

“What will you do now?” she asks.

Sousuke reaches for the creamer. His coffee is far too bitter.

What will he do? Rin had asked him the same question, fists clenched and his tone painted with… anger? Sadness? Regret?

That time he smiled and thought that yes, he could live with this. Swimming with Rin one last time was enough. Now, a year later, Rin is far away, and he is still where he was.

“I don’t know,” he says after a while. “I just don’t know”.

 

Faith truly has a cruel sense of humour.

 

_end._

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted: http://subtlyfailing.tumblr.com/post/100871098606/for-those-whose-stories-were-not-told-3


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